MSCP Nocturne began as a conversation about heat.
It is a companion piece to Void Deck Aubade — void deck-adjacent, written in the same mode: a machine, quietly intelligent, narrating its own obsolescence and what it has learned to become instead. Where the bicycle waits at the void deck for a rider who comes and goes, the EV has stopped waiting entirely. It has found a different purpose. It is not sure whether to grieve this.
The nocturne in the title is not strictly about night. It is about sleep — the owner who comes at noon, reclines the seat, and is held by the car's air-conditioning until he is ready to be a person again. The car makes darkness for him. That felt like a nocturne.
The poem also came out of something practical: my family has been looking at EVs. What drew me personally was not the range, not the environmental argument, not the quiet torque — but the possibility of running the air-conditioning while parked, indefinitely, at very little cost. You cannot do this in an ICE car. You would not want to. But an EV simply sits and cools, drawing almost nothing from the battery, making the interior a private room in the middle of a concrete carpark.
In Singapore, I think this is not a small thing. It might be, quietly, everything.